E3 2006: BodieLobus Hands-On Report

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This crazy innovative track-ball controller rocks.

By Gerry Block

With all the commotion surrounding the Wii and PS3 controllers at E3, it's hard not to get the feeling that motion tracking is the only new controller innovation out there. Fortunately for Gear, that's not the case. BodieLobus is a young company with a pretty new take on the traditional console controller, and we got a chance to go hands on with the Reflex Control unit.

The controller is, at its heart, fairly similar to a standard looking PS2 controller. The big difference, of course, is that the right analog stick has been replaced by a large optically tracked track-ball that performs the same function. The developers created the controller to bring increased precision to console FPS games, and we were eager to give the controller a try.

We hit up some Unreal Tournament action on the PS2 to give the Reflex Control controller a go. At first, the experience of manipulating the track ball instead of an analog stick was quite strange. Instead of the resistance to being pressed away from center that characterizes an analog stick, the track ball is static. The difference initially threw me off and I sucked for 10 minutes or so. Then, all of a sudden, it clicked. Whereas I had previously been getting killed again and again, I found myself on a rampage, blazing away anything that came in my path.

The critical difference I discovered between playing an FPS with the BodieLobus Reflex Control and a standard analog stick is the fact that the BodieLobus' track ball directly controls the speed of view movement, as opposed to the variable acceleration applied by an analog stick. Moving the track-ball a little moved the view a little, but at the same speed at which I spun the ball, as opposed to a little movement on an analog stick moving the view at a slower pace than a full push to a corner. Once my brain learned not to compensate for an analog stick's acceleration, I attained a level of accuracy I had never experienced without a mouse and keyboard combination.

The BodieLobus Reflex Control controller is currently in late-prototype stages while its designers work with manufacturers to bring the product to market. Challenges facing the controller include the fact that console games must support mouse input options in order to work with the Reflex Control, or get a small patch for direct support. Just about everyone that has played with the Reflex Control, including many developers, has been a major fan of the device, so with any luck we'll be seeing the controller in stores by the end of the year.